Three Brief Reviews

Slice Magazine: Issue 3

New literary magazines emerge out of old wine bottles like fruit flies and have about the same age expectancy. Slice Magazine is obviously a new journal, and it’s my favorite type: a magazine published by people who didn’t like what was already out there, and wanted to put something really good into the market. It’s sleek modern design and expensive two-color look belie the rookie mistakes in the general organization and in their timid interview style, but don’t hide their lofty ambitions.

Issue 3 of Slice is themed “In Translation,” and contains interviews with Salman Rushdie and Nam Le, among others, which have a less writer-technical, less conversational, but still literary Paris Review vibe. They seem like email interviews, with that telltale lack of follow-up questions. The poetry and prose are generally strong, even if the more workmanlike pieces do rely too much on prototypical translation-themed premises. Better fiction and verse submissions are these days attracted as much by reputation as by editors, and I think Slice is on the right track.

I’m generally underwhelmed by themed literary journals: it is very often an organizational gimmick for editors who otherwise lack vision or confidence. The breadth with which the editors of Slice have interpreted translation, though, gives me hope that they won’t need the props for long. The newsstand price of $8.00 an issue is still high for an unknown journal (the flashy celebrity-author names must help that), but if the folks at Slice focus their ambition as much in the quality of their content as in their production quality, it will soon be worth it.

Poetry: Volume 193, Number 2

I heard somewhere that the optimal lifespan of a little journal is five years: two years to get a reputation and three years to publish good work before that reputation overwrites quality. Poetry continues to be a conundrum for me. In this issue they have new translations of Roberto Bolaño, just preceding the publication of his first English-language collection.

I wonder where the editors have been. Bolaño was well-known in South America and increasingly so in the United States for the past ten years. At this point his inclusion seems like joint marketing or, saddest of literary inclinations, band-wagoning. This is not to say that the poems are poor (they’re quite good, with a surrealist bent), only that they should’ve appeared in some translation long before. It is also the fourth issue in the last year in which a dead poet has been featured: at least this time Bolaño is recently so. I’m glad to see him in Poetry, just disappointed that he should appear so late.

The four-color insert of “vispo” work is sort of laughably backward, as Russian and Italian futurists, most notably, were employing these genre-bending techniques as early as the 1920s. Then again, when they started calling the Patagonian toothfish a Chilean sea-bass, people started eating it up, too. Maybe “vispo” is the new black. And then there are Billy Collins and William Logan, whose poems here seem passable though weak, but whose names are irresistible. Adam Kirsh has an essay on the desire for recognition that, he argues, drives literary ambition and the production of literature; at its heart, the essay is an elegy to print, his own sort of keening for the loss of The Sun. I’m not sure he won’t regret the essay as Auden later regretted “Spain, 1937.”

The Forms of Youth: Twentieth-Century Poetry and Adolescence

I was immediately drawn to the premise of this book-length study. We live in an age overwhelmed by adolescence: all of the forms of life given to us are the in-between state, clinging to forms of childhood even as we dwindle in old age. In The Forms of Youth, Stephen Burt attempts to “hint at patterns in the history of literary ideas and modes” as they relate to adolescence. It is an admittedly huge idea, one whose scope could easily undermine the project, so I was heartened when Burt addressed the issue in his introduction, “I hope that readers will judge this study for what it says about the writings it does consider, rather than taking umbrage at its failure to bring in all possible relevant works.”

Burt explicates “poems about adolescence” [author’s emphasis] and the “tension between youth as pastoral and youth as rebellious or revolutionary novelty” which “emerges in the development of teen cultures throughout the twentieth century.” He gives five guideline ideas that describe modern adolescence, which are based on the work of sociologists throughout the twentieth century, and which he then uses as exemplary concepts when explicating the work of particular poets.

That the very concept of the adolescent is one in flux remains a difficulty that Burt is forced to work out with each poet, setting limits on the definition as he is about to use it for each author. As a result, it often seems that Burt is unsure of his method, and his explications become tangled – he is often at once describing the concept of adolescence and the way the poet is using it, or changing it, or re-setting the concept itself.

The book is most coherent when Burt deals with authors who most obviously sublimate adolescence into their work, such as William Carlos Williams, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Lowell, Paul Muldoon, and Yusef Komunyakaa. He is able to make the clear connection between the content or inspiration of the poems, the language used and the techniques, and the ways they represent or expand adolescence in the poet’s era.

Of Lowell, Burt cogently writes, “the most persistent symbols of Notebook . . . suggest Lowell’s endless work on his always-rough drafts, his ‘carbon scarred with ciphers’, the self as never original and never finished.” He writes as well of Komunyakaa, “In [his] poems about playground and high school sports, innocent energies are at once the motive for the poem and the representative of powers . . . that now seem lost. In ‘Slam, Dunk, & Hook’, the ‘hang time’ involved in a basketball shot . . . represent[s] the empowered interval between childhood and adult life.” Burt shows how the poems at once employ the images of and also embody that middle, unfinished state of semi-developed youth.

The strongest and most complete cases in the book are often made in regards to lesser poets, perhaps showing that their lack of complication lessens their poetic power. It makes them easier targets, but makes his argument seem slight as well. One feels that a number of the supposedly “adolescent” traits are simply human dilemmas that have been co-opted here, but don’t essentially belong, such as that “an adolescent can be in a relation of rejection to father and mother, to society and culture, but never in no relation, never simply without. And this is how Lowell regards and addresses history. . .” [author’s emphasis]. But this relationship to history hardly seems like a result of adolescence or even specific to it – what of this is not embodied in ancient pagan concepts of fate? In each chapter there are interpretations that go too far in this mode.

Still, the overall connection between poetry in the twentieth century and adolescence is on the mark, and Burt makes the case here well enough to convince. It will be interesting to see how the new millennium deals with the in-between stage of development, especially as the boomers lose the cultural centrality they now possess. For my part, I see the neo-formalists and neo-humanists as just the beginning of a reaction against it, just as the postmodern poets of the 1970s and 80s may have been the very culmination of adolescent verse, at once pastoral and revolutionary.